Ramses Sanguino, who lives in Los Angeles, California and has autism, has been described as a “child savant”, after being able to speak several different languages and solve complex mathematical equations from a young age.

Videos posted on YouTube by his mother, Nxy Sanguino, show the boy speaking Japanese at the age of two, speaking Russian at 13 months and solving algebra puzzles at five.

Dr Powell, who trained at John Hopkins University and currently runs a private practice in Medford, Oregon, is now studying Ramses as part a cutting-edge research project into telepathy.

She believes that telepathy may represent an alternative method of communication between autistic children and their parents, who ‘desperately want to communicate with one another, but can’t’.

The neuroscientist and researcher said: ‘If you think about it, if you have your primary language compromised then that would be a perfect setup for telepathy.

‘I have found many autistic children who have been reported to be telepathic and I wanted to see it for myself and see if it can be evaluated and actually tested under rigorous, controlled conditions.’

Dr Powell claims to have already seen signs of telepathy in at least seven different people.

Dr Powell analysed Ramses alleged telepathy by using a random generator to pick numbers for Ms Sanguino to think about, before asking Ramses to recite the numbers by reading his mother’s mind.

In an experiment filmed by Barcroft US, Ramses was able to guess three of five numbers correctly.

“To get three of them correct it would be one out of nine, times one out of nine, times one out of nine, which is one out of 729”, Dr Powell said. However, she also stresses the results are not conclusive.

“It’s very risky to one’s credibility to take on a subject like this”, she said. “I am as confident that telepathy exists as I am of a lot of things that are actually accepted by science.”

Ms Sanguino, who is not concerned her son may be able to read her mind, is currently trying to get sponsoring for Ramses to attend a school for gifted children.

“He is so smart that sometimes he scares me,” Nyx Sanguino said. “I really want him to have the best education in the world and be happy.”

Ms Sanguino says her son can understand and recite parts of several languages including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese.

He can also solve rudimentary algebra problems, she says.

He apparently has a knowledge of square roots – and can even draw the entire periodic table.

Ms Sanguino, who is homeschooling Ramses after he kept correcting his teacher, said ‘I knew even before he was born he was going to be someone special who would change the world.

‘Even when he was a baby he didn’t like toys, he just liked reading. He started reading when he was 12 months old and could even say words in English, Spanish, Greek and some Japanese.

‘When he was 18 months old he knew all the multiplication tables in English and Spanish and had learned the periodic table and all the atomic numbers.

‘I taught him some of the languages but I have no idea how he learned parts of Hindi, Arabic or Hebrew by the time he was three. It may have been through the house computer that is often left on.

‘I put him into a school but it was a nightmare. He was the only child who could read in the class.

‘The teacher liked him at first and called him the little professor. But soon Ramses started correcting her on some of her spelling and maths and the teacher began isolating him from other students.

‘I had to take him out of the school and back home with me.

‘He was too far ahead to learn anything there.

‘He is different and people cannot understand the way he thinks. He is obsessed with numbers and will count everything, houses, books, letters, and he won’t move on until he has counted them all.